Piercing and Righteous Damage: Cool, but not That Cool

It took me a while to figure this out, and I'm probably making too big of a deal out of it, but for some reason I feel compelled to post on it.

I think it was Mr. Strange's strategy guide that described Maces as offering a few points of "useful Piercing damage". Independently, I noticed that Righteous damage is described in the game as "ignoring enemy armor", and I got all excited when I found a ring that added 2 Righteous damage to my attacks.

Then, I did some math, and I realized that Piercing damage isn't really all it's cracked up to be, for a couple of reasons. First is that all damage that isn't Blasting, Crushing, or Slashing "ignores enemy armor". That ring of +1 Asphyxiative damage is just as special and cool as that ring of +1 Piercing damage. As of right now, there are no enemies with Righteous damage resistance, so Righteous damage does in fact always land, but every other type of 'special' damage is equally cool, because every other damage type "ignores armor" but has at least 2 enemy types that resist it.

So now we know that Righteous damage is the only damage type that is actually special, let me tell you why even it isn't all that special. This takes math.

Let's say you're attacking for 4 Crushing + 1 Blasting +2 Piercing + 2 Righteous. You're attacking an Unfriendly AI, which has an Armor Absorption of 4 and Piercing Resistance of 10. Here's what the game does:

1) First, it lumps all of your primary damage types together into a single number, and assigns it the type of the largest contributor -- so your 4 Crushing +1 Blasting becomes a 5 Crushing attack.

2) Then, the enemy's Armor Absorption sucks up it's value of that attack. Unfriendly AIs have AA 4, so your 5 Crushing attack becomes a 1 Crushing attack.

3) Next, your other damage types apply, each hitting the enemy's appropriate resistances. Your 2 Piercing damage hits the Unfriendly AI's 10 Piercing Resistance, and it vanishes. Your 2 Righteous damage hits the enemy's 0 Righteous Resistance, and you deal 2 more Righteous damage.

Now, here's why Righteous damage isn't all that cool: you would have done the exact same amount of damage if, instead of Righteous damage, you had had 2 more Blasting damage on your attack. Righteous damage only matters if your normal attack would have been entirely absorbed by enemy armor -- and unless you're swinging at Lord Dredmor himself (AA 20), the maximum that can be absorbed from any attack is 10 (Arch Diggle, Robo, Big Red, Dread Collector). That means that the instant your weapon swings for 10 points of base damage, your Righteous damage bonus is identical in every respect to 2 more points of Slashing.

Side note: of the primary damage types, Slashing is the best. Nothing in the game has Slashing resistance above and beyond their normal Armor Absorption.

 

You didn't mention crits. Do crits only apply to the base damage type?

 

Well non-mundane types all do twice as much damage as mundane types if blocked, including piercing. I'm not sure about crits though, I thought they only affected mundane types. That said, it's a bit of a tradeoff but it means that non-mundane types are less variable.

Let's say you have 4 crushing 1 blasting 2 piercing and 2 righteous again fighting an Unfriendly AI.
Except this time it blocks.
So 1 crushing (I believe it'd round down here), 1 piercing and 1 righteous
Obviously you hit for one righteous damage, which isn't much but obviously it's much less affected by block.
So even in the case of 16 crushing and 8 righteous
The crushing gets blocked to 4 and removed entirely, and the righteous to 4 and it goes through for 4 righteous damage.

 

The math goes both ways.

You don't get crit, but you don't get penalties either. If I don't have weapon skill/dual wield, then piercing/elemental is awesome since they bypass penalties. By contrast if I am actually equipping a weapon that I had the skill for, and are at least dealing normal damage = enemy resist, then more normal is better. And yes pure slashing is best normal damage, while mix of any crushing will make it just as bad as a pure crushing.

In practice it doesn't really matter since the damage difference between weapons are so great, you would want to choose the highest one anyway.

 

One fix would be to make negative resistances actually increase damage. Apply appropriate negative resistances for monsters and it'll be like a whole new type system!

This would also give a purpose to the negative righteous resistances of evil items/skills (Mark of Chthon, Mummified Ring) and open up new possibilities for buffs/debuffs.

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Regarding criticals: They effectively double your melee power. This means even if you upgrade your wooden stick to a badass +20 sword you'll still only be doing an extra 1 x Melee Power of damage on a crit.

 

Crits also bypass enemy block/dodge/counter, which at high levels can literally save your life. But yeah, the damage bonus is kind of weak sauce.

I LOVE the idea about negative resistances, though -- that's clever.

 

I don't know any monsters that deals righteous damage though.

 

There aren't any at the moment, but I expect that in 1.07, that might change.

 

I'm surprised negative resistance dont actually do that. Most games have creatures that are " weak " to something, but basically in Dredmor you can only be extra resistant to stuff ??
That should be changed indeed.

 

Seems logical that negative resistance would be detrimental. Agree.

 

Thinking about it more , negative resistances aren't as simple as they sound. How would they work?

If you attack a monster with -5 Voltaic Resistance do you...

• Deal an extra 5 damage as long as you have at least 1 point of Voltaic damage in your attack
  • Encourages getting 1 point of every type of damage without caring about the rest
• Deal double damage for the first 5 points of your Voltaic damage
  • e.g. a 5 Voltaic attack would deal 5*2 = 10 damage, a 6 Voltaic attack would deal 5*2 + 1 = 11 damage

Second idea seems okay but maybe someone can think of a better method.

 

How?

Well, resistance (R) works by removing a damage (D) point. Meaning, 2 voltaic resistance absorbs 2 voltaic damage, if 3 are dealt, 1 goes through (T).
So apparently the formula is: D - R = T, so, if D is negative, say you have -2 voltaic resistance, then if (and only if) you get voltaic damage it should add 2 extra.

But not if you do not get voltaic damage.

 

Monsters can deal righteous damage, but they have to be named monsters. This is part of what makes named monsters so dangerous -- they tend to have massive damage from random elements, which is practically impossible to effectively defend against except by avoiding melee altogether. Consider that a good amount of resistance to an element (except for piercing / basic damage) would be 4-6, while named monsters tend to deal 15+ damage via elements...

 

Yesss.

 

I don't know why so many people are speculating on how it would work as it's in the game it's just no monsters use it by default. I've gotten curses for -1 piercing resistance on floor one, and it made diggles quite annoying by adding a damage to them.

But to adding negative resistances to monsters: yay.

 

All I'm saying is that someone with a +1 Fire damage Krong shouldn't have the same bonus as someone dual wielding Magma Mace with Hand of Belimawr.

You won't even need to use elemental weapons - just Krong enough times until every attack is 'super effective'.

(You should add 'Super Effective' text when your attack is boosted by negative resistance)

 

Hmm...this also opens up fun options for negative resistances as balancing acts for slightly powerful skillsets.

G****MN I WANT THAT MOD SUPPORT SO BAD I CAN TASTE IT!! T-T